Book Review: Everyone's A Aliebn When Ur A Aliebn Too

4/33: Everyone's A Aliebn When Ur A Aliebn Too by Jomny Sun. It's a graphic novel, which is not something I ever read, but I enjoyed it. It touches on a lot of my interests: dealing with death, linguistics (here's a nifty article about the misspellings), how to feel your feelings. 

These two panels are my favorite, and I'll probably share them whenever someone brings up death anxiety. 

I love this one for its sweetness and subtle inversion of the narrative. Hamlet says, giving voice to a very real anxiety we have about dying and the fear of what might come afterwards, 

Who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscovered country from whose bournNo traveler returns, puzzles the willAnd makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?

But the little aliebn subverts that, saying to the snail, "Maybe the reason they don't come back is because the afterlife is great." [1]

But even the aliebn isn't free from death fear. He's afraid of his friends all dying, and is comforted by the snail. "It's okay," says the snail. "Everything dies. No need to fret."

It's a sweet book. A little bit of existential dread, a little bit of linguistics, a little bit of the Giving Tree. A solid foray into the graphic novel genre for me. 

Currently reading As You Wish by Carey Elwes. 

xo, 
Devo

[1] See also: Season 6 of Buffy, when she returns from the dead...and *spoiler* (though it's over a decade old so you should really get on that) it turns out she was in heaven.